Who

Gran Annoioso

Tomorrow, Gran Turismo 4 will be released for the Playstation 2. And, like a
good corporate drone, I am probably going to buy it, even though I don’t
expect it to actually be good. Because the previous game in the series, Gran
Turismo 3, really wasn’t very good, either.

The Emperor, you see, had no clothes. I’m going to buy it, of course, not
only because of my well-documented obsession for playing video
games, but also because I’m specifically a
sucker for driving games. “I will never own
these cars,” I say to myself. “I will think about buying an Evolution VIII,
and then at the last moment will realize that buying a car that gets 10 miles
to the gallon isn’t very practical, and I’ll get something sensible instead. I
will never drive on Laguna Seca,” I say. But I can pretend. “Vroom! Vrooooom.”

Perhaps GT4, as the well-greased hype machine spins it, will really be all
that and a bag of chips. Perhaps it will change my perspective on driving
games forever, the way Project Gotham Racing did. Perhaps it will be the
best game of the year.

But of course, they said that about the execrable Black and White. They said
that about the unplayably bad Ninja Gaiden. And they said it about Gran
Turismo 3, which was, in the end, just a sort of vaguely OK driving game. So
I’m not holding my breath.

I’m sure there are people – most likely white wine drinkers – who will take
issue with my characterization of GT3 as just sort of vaguely OK. But the
game’s pathos was all too clearly on display from start to finish. The awful,
anemic, and repetitive soundtrack served as the perfect counterpoint to a
racing game that was so amazingly impotent that if you came to a complete
stop in the middle of the race, the cars ahead of you would slow down to 2
miles per hour. Y’know. To give you a chance to catch up. Because it wouldn’t
be fun if your opponents actually drove the race to the best of their
abilities. (Of course, this works in reverse as well, so that if you open up a
substantial lead through transcendent driving, the chase cars suddenly are
able to exceed their vehicles’ rated top speeds. Maybe we should put these
programmers in charge of Formula 1 races this year).

The graphics, which reviewers heaped praises on, were superb in “replay” mode,
and hideously ugly in driving mode: PS2 developers seem to have huge amounts
of trouble providing full screen antialiasing for their games, something the
Dreamcast could do in its sleep. Even when a game is so desperately in need of
it as blurry, jaggy Gran Turismo 3. It’s been a few years. Maybe someone has
taught Polyphony about that checkbox in their development tools. We’ll see.

Most of the reviews complain a little bit about the omission of online play
from GT4, but that doesn’t concern me at all. Online play for the
Playstation 2 is utterly dead. It is a nonstarter. No one who matters plays
any Playstation games online. If you want to play console games online, you
own an Xbox, and that’s all there is to it. Xbox Live’s user experience is so
superior to the Playstation’s online gaming mechanisms that it’s just more
polite to pretend that the PS2’s online capabilities don’t exist at all, just
like you’d politely ignore it if someone farted at a wedding. There was a
gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and poor, clueless Sony showed up with a knife.

So given the somewhat lackadaisical product that was GT3, I don’t really
expect much from GT4. If the Nurburgring and Paris tracks are good, and I can
buy a Skyline without having to play for 36 hours, I’ll consider it an OK
investment. And who knows, perhaps I will be surprised. If I am, I’ll write
about it here.